Haresh Shah
Usurped By The Occupational Hazard
Pascual at the Hotel Ritz reception in Barcelona hands me my room key, and along with it a few folded telexes and messages from my mail slot. I walk a few steps to the elevator and as the tiny old timer cage rises, I unroll the letter size message. It says HAPPAY BIRTHDAY HARESH. Repeated umpteen times inside a white Playboy rabbit head computer graphic on the grey background. The margins are annotated and signed by everyone in my department. As slow as the elevator is, it’s still a short ride up to the fourth floor. Something about that electronically transmitted birthday card on a flimsy fax paper triggers an enormous emotional and physical outburst into me. My hands are shaking as I slide open the folding metal door of the elevator. I rush to my room, barely manage to open the door. Slam it shut and I have a total breakdown. I throw my weight in the middle of the bed, and sink into the hollow of the sagging old mattress. First I start sobbing uncontrollably. Then my whole body begins to shake violently and I feel cold sweat oozing out of every pour of my skin. And then I feel hot, like a pre-heated oven, ready for baking. I pull the blanket over, try to control my convulsions and break out into wailing sobs and a desperate cry.
It’s November 4, 1988. My 49th birthday. I am in Barcelona with Bill and Debra (Stokkan). We together have been on the road for two weeks now, visiting our editions in Munich, Rome, Istanbul, Athens and now Barcelona. This is our last stop before we would board the plane tomorrow afternoon, heading back home to Chicago. I have spent a wonderful day celebrating from the moment I got up. We have sumptuous sea food lunch at La Dorada, hosted by our Spanish partner Jose Manuel Lara of Editorial Planeta. We drink his favorite Marqués de Cáceres. And then suddenly Bill’s nose begins to bleed. Embarrassed, he sits there with his handkerchief pressed under his nostrils. Goes back and forth to the wash room. It takes a long time before the bleeding slows, if not completely stops. Jose Manuel Lara is kind and understanding.
Following the lunch, Bill runs back to the hotel, I head to the editorial offices where Sebastian (Martinez), Jose Luis (Cordoba) and Rosa (Oliva), along with the entire editorial staff are waiting for me to pop a few bottles of champagne. There have often been times when my birthday has become a cause célèbre to my total amazement. And so it is today. Not much I can do about. After two weeks of back-to-back meetings, being wined and dined and hopping on and off the planes, running to and checking in and out of hotels, packing and unpacking, all three of us are beginning to feel bit of fatigue settling in.
Must have been around half past six or seven when I come back to the hotel and experience total collapse. As I lie in middle of the bed, sinking deeper and deeper in the human indentation, and when finally the shakes and chill and the fever I felt earlier subsides somewhat, I know I can’t just turn over and go to sleep. The finale is yet to come. Playboy Spain’s publisher, Fernando Castillo and his wife Anna are to come pick us up from the hotel at nine. This is our last night in Spain and its my birthday. He knows that I love Paella, especially at my favorite restaurant Quo Vadis in Ramblas But he has his own favorite and wants to take us to Lauria. I somehow manage to compose myself, and get out of bed and take a refreshing shower. Feeling just a little bit better, but not well enough to go out on the town and sit through an entire evening and be my old social butterfly self.
Fernando has pre-ordered Paella for me. Its sitting there, sizzling in its traditional pan, the lobster tails shining orange and the little shrimps with tails staring at me with their ink black eyes. The rice is beginning to simmer and I don’t even smell the pungent Spanish saffron. I want so bad to dig in and devour this succulent, most delicious and exotic of the Spanish delicacies. But instead, I find myself staring at it as if the Paella pan were an objet d’art. Soon the waiter brings whatever the others have ordered and dishes out some Paella and gently serves a portion in my plate. I pick up a fork-full and put it in my mouth. I can’t taste it at all. Fernando is looking at me with anticipation and somehow I manage to say, esta sabrosa. I am thankful that there are also Bill and Debra and the burden of making the conversation doesn’t fall entirely on me. But still! I have a choice of facing up or take a couple of more bites and risk throwing up. I face up. I don’t feel too good. Bill and Debra aren’t feeling that hot either. We somehow manage to wing it.
I feel a bit better in the morning and manage my last meeting in Spain, have breakfast with Roger Aguade, the advertising manager. In the afternoon we are on our way back to Chicago via Amsterdam. The upper deck of the Business Class is practically empty so the three of us spread out. During the nine hour journey, we barely exchange a few sentences with each other, each one of us nursing our personal pains, mostly caused by the super fatigue. When we arrive, I am glad that Carolyn and Anjuli are there to pick me up. Bill and Debra brush them by with perfunctory greetings and are gone. Must have been in more pain than I had realized. When we get in bed is when Carolyn realizes my body feels hot like freshly baked potato right out of an oven. I am running the temperature of 102 °F (38.9 °C). We write it off to me being overly tired.
But the fever is here to stay. Over the next three days the temps swing between 102 °F (38.9 °C) and 103°F (39.4 °C). I am floating in our king size water bed like a whale squirming with extreme pain flipping up and down. I have no will to do anything. I have no appetite. I feel certain loss of my basic motor skills. Normally, Anjuli would have walked home from school, but on the third afternoon, its raining heavily. I get dressed, get into my car and drive two short blocks to pick her up. I feel the car sway sideways and realize I have lost my power of coordination. Fortunately we make it back home and I crawl back into bed. Realizing that perhaps my fever was more serious than we thought, Carolyn finds the primary care physician for me. Dr. Anne Niedenthal. She prescribes Ceclor and then has me x-rayed and has my blood tested. My white cell count is high at 13,400 to the normal range of 4,300 to 10.800. I hallucinate. My water bed bursts and I am struggling to stay afloat with my arms and legs flailing, the water splashing, with only my bopping head managing to stay above the deluge. No, I am not drowning. My entire body breaks out first in cold and then hot sweat. I am alone at home. The temperatures refuse to budge.
On the next day, Dr. Niedenthal orders me to meet her at the central registration of Evanston Hospital so she can get me admitted immediately. I am upset. Anjuli begins to cry. Carolyn retains her professional posture, but barely. I am hooked up to multiple tubes and the TV monitor up above blips endlessly. They monitor me all night long at regular intervals, taking my temp and blood samples. The next morning, I open my eyes to four interns huddling over me along with Dr. Francine Cook , who specializes in contagious diseases. In addition to the tubes sprouting from my arms, he prescribes heavy doses of Flagyl and Ceftazidime-Dextrose. While I am still roasting, I am aware of everything that goes on around me. They have not yet been able to figure out what it is that maybe wrong with me. It must be dire. Carolyn is a staff nurse in the hospital and she has access to and understands all that’s being discussed. I am told later, that Anjuli and her went home and cried. All reports point to my early exit from this material world. Curiously, not once did the possibility of me not getting out of the hospital alive crosses my mind.
I go through a battery of tests to include blood, urine, ultrasound and ultimately, the cat scan of which I write interesting. On the third day, the temperature begins to subside. On the fourth, the tubes are removed, which gives me an ultimate sense of freedom. Now the visitors begin to pour in. I have no dietary restrictions. Having tasted hospital food for a couple of days, I realize that irrespective of what I ask for, it all tastes the same, smelling predominantly of the dirty brown plastic covers that breathe over every meal delivered. So Carolyn and Anjuli bring me BigMac with heap of fries. Chinese chicken fried rice. Still barely palatable.
Now that I have the freedom of the movement, I go and talk to the nurses at their station. They allow me to sit with them in their lunch room and eat with them. I go down to the gift shop in my long burgundy terry gown with black and avocado stripes. On impulse, I buy for Carolyn a handmade two piece suite for $250.- . Talk with the sales ladies in the shop. But I am bored stiff and can’t wait to get out of the hospital. But Dr. Westenfelder (Grant O.), who, giving the benefit of the doubt to my illness is the first one to pronounce what I have to be a possible Amoeba infection. He guesses it right and treats me accordingly with Flagyl. Perhaps too heavy a doze and for too long of a period, which has left me with tingling and some loss of grip in my ten toes, with the name of peripheral neuropathy.
Three months later, I am in Mexico City – my first trip since my return to Chicago. At my friend Ignacio Barrientos’ urging, I go see Dr. Bernardo Tanur. Just within minutes of talking with me Dr, Tanur knows that I had amoebas. They treated me with the right medication, but for three times as long. You never give Flagyl to anyone for more than one week maximum. Its mainly a tropical infection, something I couldn’t have picked up living in the Northern Hemisphere, and Dr. Westenfelder could not have treated many similar cases, if any at all. Could it be that I picked up amoebas during one of my earlier trips to Mexico? They laid dormant until my immune system was overspent and attacked it soon as they knew it would be an easy knockout? But in my mind, I connect it with something vile I tasted in that sweetbread they served at the restaurant Florian in Barcelona on Playboy Spain’s 10th anniversary dinner, just the night before. Whatever the cause, I guess the peripheral neuropathy, which I still have, is a small price to pay for still being alive and living to tell the tale, twenty five years later.
Haresh Shah 2013
Illustration: Celia Rose Marks
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